Oolite Bulletins

Now that we have RandomShipNames to add a bit of character to the entities we encounter in our travels, how about something similar for the ship yard itself.

Something along the lines of a brief history of the ship you're looking at. It could be a salesman's patter e.g. "This adder was only ever flown on Octeday's by a little old lady (who was actually quite handy with a laser)."

Or perhaps, "Ah now, the Cobra III you're looking at now has actually seen action in the battle of Teraed - GalCop records indicate that she took down 12 bandits. I can assure you that this one won't let you down when it counts."

This is a great idea!

"The previous owner of this ship was a small yellow rodent, you may have to pull your legs up a bit to fit in the pilot's seat."

Difficult, though – you'd need to construct a variety of sentences into which random elements could be dropped, like the planet descriptions. You could have descriptions relating to sight, smell, sound; layout of crew quarters; description of previous owner(s); notable events in the ship's history etc. Obviously not all elements would have to appear in every description. You'd need a lot of sentence types, though. The planetary descriptions get away with minimal differences because a) we're used to it and don't expect anything else, and b) because the planets are pretty anonymous anyway. The ships, though, are personal: we'd want personality.

There would also, I imagine, be a strict limit on the length of any description: it might be limited to something like

"This is the ship that made the <systemname> run in less than <randomnumber> days."

But when you've seen that more than twice, it might get a bit old.

Also, in general the ships are supposed to be new, not second-hand.

Commander McLane wrote:

Also, in general the ships are supposed to be new, not second-hand.

That's certainly not the case for Pythons...none have been built for around 300 years as I understand it (unless they've been gathering dust in the showroom for that long! )

Commander McLane wrote:

Also, in general the ships are supposed to be new, not second-hand.

I've been thinking about that. As Smivs says, the Pythons have been around – plus there are all the ships with extra bits of kit fitted. Some of them will be brand-new (there are a lot of replacements required, after all) but I think a lot of them are maybe reconditioned.

I see the ships for sale being (mostly) reconditioned but used ships...not like they are hauled to 1000's of systems to be sold nor were they BUILT there! Since they've had a reconditioning equal to what it takes to get them back to 100%, that justifies their full price.